Parvati's Eyes
by Sallywags
Summary: A monologue about the war and Harry through the eyes of Parvati Patil. How does she feel about the birth of a legend? What did she see? What does she really think? Is she really as shallow as she seems? She was sorted into Gryffindor for a reason…


**Parvati's Eyes**

**Disclaimer:** **I own nothing except what little there is of a plot so please don't sue!**

**Summary: ****A monologue about the war and Harry through the eyes of Parvati Patil. How does she feel about the birth of a legend? What did she see? What does she really think? Is she really as shallow as she seems? She was sorted into Gryffindor for a reason…AU after OOTP (No mention of horcruxes and assumes that the war continues on for several years after Harry left school, meaning that most of the DA would have joined the order, other than that it mostly sticks to cannon)**

Harry Potter. The latest pin up of the wizarding world. I wonder what he'd think of that…

Handsome, brave, a genuine hero, every girl's dream, apart from the fact that he's dead of course.

The man who died to save us from You-Know-Who, the last martyr for the cause.

I know what you're thinking.

I'm just another fan girl, _right_? **Wrong.**

I actually knew him, went to school with him for seven years, even went out with him once, about a million years ago. Okay we weren't in love, and I'm not pretending we were ever close or anything but I knew him, better than those bozos in the Prophet printing all that shit about him, be it good or bad I **know** they never got the story right.

And what you're now probably thinking is that since when did I ever care about the news being accurate? I mean I read Witch Weekly for Merlin's sake, a gossip rag! When have I ever cared about the truth?

I'll let you in on a secret then, I'm not as shallow as I look. No, I'll never be a brainbox like Padma, that's not my style, but I do think about things. I'm not all about hair and makeup and clothes, I have a mind, and sometimes I do actually use it. I **do** care about people. And it **does** kill me that no one will ever really know the truth about him.

Harry Potter, the real man, not this triumphant fantastic hero the press loves to show us. Because when you get down to it…he was a decent guy. Not incredibly brainy, or incredibly handsome (really he wasn't when you actually think about it), just a decent guy. A guy who should be remembered as just that, a good guy, Ron and Hermione Weasley's best friend, Ginny's husband, it's what he would have wanted. He was the guy you'd want in your corner during a fight, and I can attest to that, the guy who'd do anything for a friend, who always stood up to bullies, who always had your back even if he barely knew you.

I'll always remember that very first flying lesson, Harry throwing the rules out of the window for a guy he barely knew, risking his neck just because he thought it was the right thing to do. It set the tone for the rest of our school lives whether we realised it or not, in hindsight it was a defining moment for all of us there.

From that point on the battle lines were drawn and the Gryffindors were with Harry, no matter what. We didn't know that then, couldn't see beyond the petty squabbles of childhood, but all the right elements for war were already there just waiting to ignite. Ours was a generation risen from the ashes of the first war, it only makes sense that we would be the ones to fight the second war, that's what happened with the muggles with World Wars one and two, it only made sense that the same would apply to us. And just as in that moment in our first flying lesson Harry would be the one to lead us, maybe the press is right in that sense, that fact might as well have been written in the stars. Irrefutable, fate, destiny whatever you want to call it.

But I'm getting ahead of myself, as interesting as it is looking at our childhood that way, as one gigantic puzzle foreshadowing events to come. I'm behaving like them, trying to see things that aren't there, that were never there. Sometimes things just are, there is no ulterior motive, no grand design, things just happen that don't mean anything, they're just there, random events. The way the press talks you'd think there's no such thing as coincidence, but there is, that's just life, not everything is predestined, even someone as interested in divination as me knows that. So back to the man I knew…

I'm not blind, I can see what they mean about the handsome bit, he is…except he's not really. Sounds ridiculous I know but it's a charisma thing. You've either got it or you haven't, and he had it. All you had to do was look at him, look at the conviction in those legendary green eyes and you just knew; you'd follow him to hell and back. With most people that kind of thing doesn't translate well into photos, but with him it did. That kind of intensity can transcend space and time, because even if you don't want to believe him you **know**. A look like that can't be faked, the knowledge in those haunted eyes is real whether you like it or not and **nothing** can change that.

There is something incredibly sexy about that look. Strange but true. Harry Potter the sex symbol. If he ever heard that he would have been rolling around on the floor laughing or blushing horrendously. They don't seem to think so, war heroes don't blush! Shows what they know, like I said, we weren't best friends, but I did know the guy, they didn't.

This obsession with him can't last forever, it'll be over soon, I hope. Is it wrong that I want that? That I want them to forget? I mean… I don't want them to forget really, but this…it's tainting his memory for the ones who really cared. I'm not stupid; I know that doesn't include me. We were never close. Truthfully I'd have liked to have been, and not because he was Harry Potter but because he was a good guy, a good laugh, sometimes, there just wasn't time…There's never time, that's the point. Life is but a fleeting dream, over all too fast at the best of times and it's not like Harry had long. And now I sound like Padma, waxing poetical over this, maybe I'm being overly dramatic, it just...gets to me, you know?

I know he wasn't perfect, I mean talk about dense when it came to girls! That fiasco with Cho Chang had me and Lavender snickering for months and then there were years he agonised over Ginny Weasley. I swear that boy could be so blind it wasn't even funny!

No respect for divination either, I only later learned why that was, and he could be such a pain in lessons, always in the shit for something or other, fun to watch, but a nightmare situation when competing for the house cup. He was probably in detention more times in one year than I was in seven and I don't even want to think about how many points he lost us. But he was just…Harry. Sure we were all a bit overwhelmed by him at first but he was just such a …boy. Just like any of the other boys in my year, just another one of the guys, we got used to him being there and he could be so sweet, so utterly charming that you just couldn't stay mad at him for long.

Thing was at least when we were younger he never meant to be so charming, it just happened, natural to him, like breathing I suppose. But the older he got the stronger it got, by seventh year it was pretty killer actually and he used it well, not to flirt, but to convince, to seduce, to wheedle. Charm can often win a war you know, except now they've turned it into something it never was.

You'll often see pictures painted of women falling at his feet, it didn't happen, there wasn't time and quite frankly no one would have done it anyway. What kind of soldiers hit on the general? Some people have very romanticized versions of war, all 'I love you's, torrid affairs and long goodbyes. Teenage girls mostly, and loathe as I am to admit it, once upon a time that would have been me, drooling over some hot war hero, giggling and gossiping, oh for the simplicity and naivety of youth! But you can't go back. Now I know, it doesn't work like that. War isn't romance it's death; there is no dressing up that fact. It's efficient, cold, brutal and yes often fatal but we never had time for goodbyes, for affairs, hell most of us didn't even have time for love.

We had to be cold, unfeeling, hard. We had to become what we hated in order to win, regrettable but true. And he was the best of all of us at that. Shutting down his emotions completely, harsh, cold, utterly untouchable, and yes handsome, but more in a 'carved out of stone' way than a pin up way. He had to be tough to win and he was. He could be frightening too, so cold he almost seemed inhuman.

They never write about that, how you could look into Harry Potter's eyes and see the abyss staring back at you. Was that the kind of look you would have found in You-Know-Who's eyes once upon a time? Now that's a comparison you will never hear about in the press, more's the pity, they had a lot in common. And that look… it was the haunted look of a man who had stared death in the eye one too many times. I never knew anyone who could stare him down; it was unnerving enough catching his eyes only briefly. Those eyes seemed to positively glow with power, with pain.

What they'll never say is that he could so easily have been a new dark lord in the making, but he never was…It never worried me, or anyone who really knew him, because when you got down to it, to Harry and You-know-Who, Harry was stronger, no question. We all new that even if he had to embrace the darkness to win he would never let it consume him. That I suppose is the kind of strength you'd expect the fairy tale hero of the press to have, but what they don't realise is that, that strength to overcome the darkness…it didn't come from love, it came from hatred, from pain, from fear, the need for revenge. They couldn't be more wrong about Harry if they tried. I doubt they'll ever get his reasons right, as it is I can only guess at why he felt this way. I don't know the whole story but I could read the emotion in his eyes, and as they say, the eyes are the windows to the soul. His had been shattered for almost as long as I'd known him.

Still, strength and virtue aside, despite what they say of how he, 'never gave up hope' I know better, everyone who was there does. I know sometimes he wanted to end it all; you'd have had to have been blind not to see it, the despair. Sometimes you could look at him and know, he was thinking about **it**, death. The pink elephant in the room, always with us but never acknowledged. It could have been anyone of us at any time but we never said **it**, superstition perhaps? I don't know and frankly I don't particularly care to think about that time, it was bad enough living through it once. I don't know how he did it, survived for as long as he did; he saw more of the war than any of us. How he kept his sanity I'll never know, but that was only later, at first he was just a boy…

And what a **boy** he was, he could be completely artless, brash, rude, a nightmare date actually but you couldn't hate him for it because if there was something he always was it was honest. He'd tell you what he thought right to your face even if he was being insensitive. But here's the paradox, he could be completely insensitive and brash one minute, then sweet and understanding the next.

He seemed to have a radar for people in pain, don't know how he did it. Like Neville, he always seemed to see him even when the rest of us treated him like wallpaper. It was cruel but we were young, stupid, and it's too late to take it back now. Dean had a theory; he said in order to see it you had to have felt it. I didn't understand then, let's just say that I do now. It's hard to see the wood from the trees when you're thirteen, and I suppose none of us really wanted to know just how much pain he was always in because he was our rock. The one who always knew what to do when things got bad. To us he was invincible, strong, we didn't want to know about his pain because if he was breaking, if he was hurting who was there to hold onto, to save us? If you had a problem he was the one you always turned to, consciously or not and even if he didn't know what he was doing he never let you down.

You'd think it would have been Hermione we turned if we were in trouble, seems obvious doesn't it? The girl's a certified genius! She seems so together, so eager to help, to protect. But leadership isn't a learnt skill it just **is**. The one thing Hermione could never learn from a book, how to stay cool under pressure, how to lead. Truth is, she's not much good in an emergency, she tends to over think things, to freeze, a leader needs the ability to think through panic, Harry could do that but she never could. She was never exactly easy to talk to either, when I said Harry could be insensitive, she could be worse, you wouldn't expect it from a girl but it's true. Whatever the reasoning behind it we all knew; she was never what we needed, never someone we could follow.

He was the leader that much I suppose they were right about, he just always was. Pack structure I suppose you'd call it but the Gryffindors in my year, myself included always followed him (with a few notable exceptions) virtually from day one. But they're wrong in what they think, he never sought it, it just happened, if it hadn't been him it would have been someone else but it was always going to be him, and not because he was Harry Potter but because some subconscious part of us recognised him for what he was even before he did, powerful. The potential was always there, some people are just born to lead. He was one of them, they're not wrong about that, but they are, as always turning it into something ludicrous. In a hundred years his story won't even be vaguely recognisable and there is something infinitely tragic about that.

It's not that I don't want them to remember him, after everything he did he should be remembered, but not like this! I wish the truth would just come out. Legends are all well and good, but they're not **real **and that's what we're doing here, spawning a legend, a legend he would never have wanted. White washing the truth to make it more palatable, then telling the tale like a fairy story. Like Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will live on in perpetuity in the collective mind of the wizarding world. But it won't be the truth, only a mere shadow of the real events and for all my love of dramatic literature it seems wrong that such a man should be relegated to a world of shadows and dust.

The hero on the white horse that is who he will be from now onwards, but that isn't who he ever was. Harry was all about ambiguity, shades of grey and doing what had to be done. It's a mockery to make him into the Arthur of our age, the 'moral' hero of the story. That's not how wars are won.

I suppose I have no choice but to embrace the legend of the Boy Who lived, he will live on even when Harry Potter has long since been forgotten. What a waste of potential, you can learn far more from the truth than you ever could from a legend.

They're wrong you know, I do think about deep things sometimes. Padma's right, you should never judge a book by it's cover. Wouldn't they all be surprised if they knew what was going through my mind? But some things are better left unsaid; this story will never be told.

**Right this had been knocking around on my desktop for weeks, call it the plot bunny that just wouldn't die. To start with all I had was the opening few lines, didn't even know who said them they just appeared on the page from there I just kept going until I finally thought 'hey this sound like something Parvati might say', it just sort of snow balled from there. I wasn't going to publish this, I've been doing a lot of POV's after Harry's death lately (none of which really seem to come from the same universe) but apparently they were not enough and I felt the urge to do it again. Anyway since this piece has been niggling at my mind so much lately I thought I might as well get some constructive criticism about it.**

**I'm not entirely sure how this has worked out, there are some parts I really like, and as always some parts that I don't really think work but anyway tell me what you lot think since it's your opinion that counts!**

**Please review! **

**It's your comments that keep me writing, keep me striving to do better!**

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